A Room of One's Own

Virginia Woolf’s classic plea for a world in which women are free to use their gifts is as powerful and resonant as ever. In this influential extended essay, Virginia Woolf outlined what women need in order to fully make use of their abilities. Using powerful images and memorable thought experiments--such as a fictional sister of William Shakespeare, who is as talented as her brother but limited in ways he was not--Woolf analyzes the many ways in which women have been held back throughout history and still are in her own time.